Charlie Chaplin on Butte, America

“Such cities as Cleveland, St. Louis, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Kansas City, Denver, Butte, Billings, throbbed with the dynamism of the future and I was imbued with it” wrote Chaplin in his book aptly titled “My Autobiography.” Chaplin freely admitted in his book that he spent some time in Butte’s infamous red light district and looked back at that time with fondness. He wrote — “Butte boasted of having the prettiest women of any red-light district in the West, and it was true. If one saw a pretty girl smartly dressed, one could rest assured she was from the red-light quarter, doing her shopping. Off duty looked neither right nor left and were most respectable. Years later, I argued with Somerset Maugham about his Sadie Thompson character in the play Rain. Jeanne Eagels dressed her rather grotesquely, as I remember, with spring-side boots. I told him that no harlot in Butte, Montana could make money if she dressed like that.” The silent film star also shared — “I actually saw gunplay in the street, a fat old sheriff shooting at the heels of an escaped prisoner, who was eventually cornered in a blind alley without harm, fortunately.”

The only good Indian...

"By a private letter from Rawling Springs, [sic] we learn that the boys up there did not waste the Indian they captured up there yesterday, in fact he was an unusually profitable investment. After they got a scalp apiece off him, they sent what was left down to Fort Steele to the Surgeon there who will use it to good purpose in studying and demonstrating comparative anatomy."

(Later, in same paper: Sheridan vs Colyer) " Four-fifths of the Congressmen and Senators sustain General Sheridan in the position hehas taken in Indian affairs. It is generally assumed here that Mr. Vincent Colyer is a visionary humanitarian, whose observations, both in Alaska and on the plains, are of little practical consideration. A decided reaction has taken place against the Quaker and Samaritan policy adapted towards the savages, and a considerable number of the Western and Pacific coast are even hostile to to making any more Indian treaties or distributing food amongst the tribes. It is alleged that feeding the Indians make them to persist in their nomadic and shiftless mode of life. Sheridan’s catalog of recent Indian atrocities is generally accepted as authentic, and it has aroused abhorrence. The pacific, compromising policy is decidedly below par." --Laramie Sentinel.